


Pity

by RoryKurago



Category: Oblivion (2013)
Genre: Clones, Dogs, F/M, Morality Pets, Post-Apocalypse, Psychology, peripheral Sykes/Kara
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:22:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24893860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoryKurago/pseuds/RoryKurago
Summary: It was pity more than sentiment that drove Kara to save the pup.
Relationships: Kara/Sergeant Sykes (Oblivion 2013)
Kudos: 4
Collections: Rory's 100 Themes Writing Challenge





	Pity

**Author's Note:**

> Theme 33: Pity
> 
> Mood music: 'Goliath' - Woodkid; 'Close Your Eyes' - Christophe Beck; 'Never Tear Us Apart' - INXS.
> 
> Don't ask me how this started with 'Never Tear Us Apart', I guess I just have strong feelings about dogs.

Pity more than sentiment drove PFC Kit Kara to save the pup. The two were hard to distinguish, but one was more fatal than the other. She caught the pup’s weak crying in the drone-raked Bodoni settlement, her helmet filtering its cries to an alien cadence.

It would die shortly, like everything else here. Drones had detected a bio-trail; the settlement had paid the price. This slip of life could only follow.

Sloppiness. Bad luck. Either way. Kit extended a gloved fingertip to the pup. It suckled her armour.

She looked to Sergeant Sykes to gauge his reaction. He looked away. He was better than Kit at fending off pity – and sentimentality – when they came scratching at his heart. Normally Kit sealed the hatch against them too, but she was grey with the dust of Bodoni’s disintegrated dead. Grey as the pup.

Pity crept in despite her as the pup suckled her glove clean.

It jolted back to camp in a bag slung over her chest, sucking honey from a bit of clean cloth scrounged from the wreckage.

It was pity that drove her to feed it from her own meals, too, though Sykes blasted her for giving a useless lifeform her extended protein ration (carefully calculated to keep the colony’s combat elements fighting fit). Kit knew good sense when she heard it.

When the squad returned to the colony, she handed the pup off to a family whose toddler promptly named it ‘Pretty Grey’. Sykes snorted when she returned without it.

…

It was neither pity nor sentiment but grim self-interest that pulled Kit from her bed that night. ‘Good sense’ nothing: Pretty turned out to be perversely loyal. She would sleep with no one but Kit.

Kit slithered grumpily down two levels of ladder and scooped the pup up to the Shadows’ dormitory to silence its piteous cries. At Kit’s pallet, she slung the pup gently into the blanket, where it rolled twice and quieted to a surprised peep.

“There,” Kit muttered. “Hush your whimpering.”

The wakeful squad grumbled their thanks and recriminations, and went gratefully to sleep. Kit slipped back between the blankets.

The pup waited until she was ensconced and then crawled in and curled up at her chest. Kit peered down at her.

In the gloom of the blankets, the pup’s mottled coat blended to nothing—the colour of the world outside, and of the ash left when drones zapped Shadows. The pup's posture hid the liquid eyes so reminiscent of the Shadows’ monocles.

It was more a creature of this dying world than were the Shadows.

Grudgingly, Kit put an arm around it and went to sleep, vowing to wake before it could make water on her.

She made apologies to the family in the morning. Pretty—Pity, would stay with Kit. Purely for logic, obviously. She couldn’t be howling down the dormitories every night.

…

They lost most of Darwin Squad in trying to take a drone for its fuel cell, including Sykes’ best friend. Hendersen broke open his private still for the occasion. As a unit, Aleppo Squad drank a private memorial after the colony-wide service. Individually…

It was pity, not sentiment, that drove Kit to peel back the blankets when her sergeant came to her pallet. So: not so impermeable after all. Darwin had been tasked with the mission because he’d wanted more time to train Aleppo.

Possibly he came to Kit because she was the only female Shadow not paired up. Possibly he couldn’t take the soft sympathies of the women in the wider colony—their sweet, unthinking desire to absolve his guilt and stroke away the bitterness. Kit had no such softness in her.

Pity straight as Hendersen's rotgut made room for him in the cradle of her thighs. Good sense buried her teeth in his shoulder so her sighs didn’t stir the Shadows around them. He tasted of metal and uncut ethanol and he left bruises for which he didn’t apologise.

Pity the Dog was banished to the floor beneath the pallet. Later, while Sykes slept, Kit reached down to assure the dog she was still there. Pity pressed her cheek into the cup of Kit’s palm.

It wasn’t love that squeezed Kit’s heart, she told herself. It was only the comfort of familiarity. The thing that had drawn Sykes to herself. Utility. The will to survive.

…

Technician Red Three-Eight was a bust. Aleppo Squad brought him in without a hitch, and he answered questions readily enough. Seemed prepared to do whatever Beech asked of him to save his plastic skin. And _yet_.

Kit was on guard duty. Pity slipped the children who were supposed to be watching her and came to visit her mother.

Three-Eight turned in horror at the sound of her soft, questing whuffs—sure that the Scavs were coming with a new unimagined torture. Kit had never seen such wonder and fear comingled in a Plastic’s eyes.

A man who truly held memories of the World Before would never look at Pity thus.

Sykes was securing the door across from Kit. She caught his eye to check he was tracking this reaction too. His rifle clicked as he raised it. Three-Eight couldn’t be the man Commander Beech hoped he was.

…

The colony couldn’t disintegrate like the drones could, but they still cremated their dead. Kit stripped the Plastic of everything useful before the burners took him. She congratulated herself at feeling nothing beyond the pleasure of another pair of sturdy boots for the colony. No sentiment; no pity. Nothing dangerous. A decommissioned Plastic was still just a Plastic.

Pity nosed her thigh, making her jump. Kit offered the dog her hand to sniff. The Plastic’s fluids still streaked her glove.

Pity didn’t seem to think much of that. She whuffed and trotted off down the tunnel, nails clicking against the metal grille. Kit took a moment to wash her gloves and then tucked the boots under her arm. She left the interrogation room satisfied that saving the pup hadn’t softened her.

…

Her assessment might have been hasty. Not long after Three-Eight, Pity stowed away aboard the Shadows’ sled for the first time and wasn’t discovered until dawn. She was as canny as her mother. Despite Kit’s resolve, she couldn’t bring herself to order the dog back to the colony.

She raged silently, gagged by noise discipline: Aleppo crouched mere klicks from a Tech residential tower. No telling how sensitive a detection system the enemy might have surrounding their Plastics now. Kit glared at her fur-daughter from behind the glassy black monocle of her helm.

She could order Pity back and the dog would go. She surely knew the way. She could follow her own trail as securely as a drone. Yet dawn already lightened the east. It was cold—bitterly so, and windy. And the colony was an awfully long walk back.

Further: the observation about drones was not amiss. The light hours were rife with them. They would annihilate any terrestrial life other than Plastics. If Pity went, they would find her. She would be ash as grey as her pelt in the wind.

Kit sought Sykes. He was occupied giving the machine gunner her left and right of arc.

In theory, he wouldn’t make Kit order the dog back. If Pity hadn’t actively compromised the mission, she shouldn’t passively compromise it by widening their footprint either.

In practice, what he wouldn’t do was give Kit an out of the dilemma by removing the decision from her hands. Whatever choice she made – what weakness she owned – she would carry, like a pup in a sling.

Kit held her tongue. Pity stayed beneath the tarpaulin.

…

It was that weight on her chest that stayed her hand the second time, too. And the third, the eighth, the eightieth. Pity, pure as the ethanol that tasted like breathing fire. Pity that weakened the soul it opened to suffering.

It was pity that damned her.

On their final mission, Pity sneaked aboard the sled and was discovered just as Aleppo settled in to wait for a drone to enter their kill zone.

Kit stared at her fur-daughter in the last orange rays draining from the stadium. Sunset turned Pity’s ash-grey coat to honey.

It was too late to send her back. Night. Cold. Oncoming drones. Kit put herself between Pity and Sykes, and gestured the dog into the cover of the tunnel beneath the half-collapsed amphitheatre.

Nell brought down the drone they lured in; Hendersen took his fire team to secure it. Once it was neutralised, the squad hunkered down to wait. Kit took up her customary position with Pity to one side and Nell to the other. In pairs, they slept: one on, one off. At some point, both Nell and Kit drifted off.

Kit woke without Pity. The dog must, Kit realised through the lightning flashes of adrenaline, have wandered away seeking insects in the rubble.

Nell grabbed Kit as she scrambled automatically to her haunches. “No!” Nell hissed.

Kit froze. It was too late: the rumble of approaching aircraft vibrated the armour against her skin.

The Plastic’s craft set down a short way from the smoking drone. He debussed jauntily—a blue technician, this time. Four-Nine. Without fear or hurry, he scanned the surrounds. Spoke to open air. Seemed unperturbed by the lack of response. Tinkered with the drone.

And when he was done, he turned toward the tunnel where the Shadows waited.

Pity planted herself between her mother and the threat, and barked.

The Plastic raised his weapon. Kit’s heart squeezed.

Not love, she told herself. Not bracing for loss. She didn’t fear watching Pity die, because she wasn’t attached. She didn’t carry that weakness with her, hadn’t fed it from her own plate, cleaned up its sick, picked the fleas from its coat. She didn’t hold it close at night or see her reflection in its eyes.

The Plastic raised his weapon and fired into the sky. Surely it was circuitry fluid that had split a seam in Kit’s helmet somewhere, and now ran hotly down her cheek.

Pity fled at the sound of gunfire, and Aleppo busied themselves with surviving entanglement with Drone One-Eight-Six.

Four-Nine got away. Aleppo carried home the armour of four Shadows. The bodies, they left to blow from the stadium on the wind.

Later, pity moved Kit’s hand to bind the Plastic’s bleeding head before blindfolding him, and held her back from giving him a dose of sedative that would make him sick when he woke instead of just groggy. Sykes made a sound of disgust when she defended the choice.

Later still, although she denied it, pity persuaded her to offer the new-faced Plastic a drink of water—a gesture of kindness that loosened the woman’s tongue and pried out the story she hadn’t been willing to tell Commander Beech. He tugged his eyebrow thoughtfully when Kit reported it to him, and went to await the revival of the technician.

And finally – after the enemy’s explosion lit up the sky, the sacrifices of both Four-Nine and Commander Beech, and the miraculous return of Pity the Dog (filthy but magnificently alive) – pity drove Kit to pull Sykes aside and tell him baldly that he’d been bitter long enough. It was time to start being human as well.

He didn’t thank her for that. But he didn’t cuss her out, either. He sat silently beside her on the bench the colony had put on the roof of the factory to enjoy the newly-permissible daylight, and rubbed a hand pensively through Pity’s gritty ruff.

Kit let him mull it over. In the meantime, she closed her eyes and tipped her head back to the sky, Pity’s flank warm against her bare calf.


End file.
